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Is this worse than an IT manager that types on a keyboard like it is some type machine from the 60's ? Picture this : typing with only 2 fingers, 90% of the time he is typing a word, deleting one letter at the time, types the same word again. Deleting the whole sentence (again, one letter at the time)
and he starts all over again... -
I don't get this bitching about pronouns, you literally used the neutral them in this post. It's so natural that even when you're deliberately trying to use something else it slips in. All you have to do is to continue using neutral like you instinctively do before you learn someone's gender. To use neutral plural is to not reference gender.
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I actually can't write automatically. It's supposed to be a fun exercise for writers or even a form of therapy but I'm just completely unable to do it. The way I naturally think about my writing is as a presentation aimed at an audience. I think to write in a flow like that requires the author to completely focus on just their own thoughts and not how those thoughts might be perceived.
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@lorentz I’m sorry but people who want us to use funny pronouns are annoying in almost all aspects of their personality.
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@Tounai Neopronouns are a different question, I don't like them because they signal "you should remember this extra info about me or else I'll be insulted". The neutral them actually allows me to remember LESS information about a person.
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@Tounai I just don't see why any reasonable person would be upset when someone prefers not to discuss a topic that's completely irrelevant such as gender. Making a big deal out of it and insisting on the gender you inferred based on their name or appearance is troll behaviour.
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@lorentz So what is next ? Instead of saying Hello we should all ask first after his/her pronouns ?
If you look like a woman, you are a 'she', when in doubt, Just using 'you' should be fine until other clues are coming. (voice, name, ...) -
@Grumm You missed my point. You don't ask, you just use "them" unless you know the gender. It's literally easier than trying to infer one, and it's FAR easier and more mature than inferring one and then insisting that your guess is right and the person you're guessing about is wrong.
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@Grumm You can also call conservative cis men and women "them", I regularly do, they don't notice because it's normal correct English and it doesn't assume anything about them that would be incorrect and catch their eye. It only becomes an issue when the conversation is political and they're paying attention.
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@lorentz I am not making a big deal out of this, I just don’t speak to those people. All I ask in return is that they don’t speak to me neither.
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@lorentz Sorry, English is not my primary language. I would just use 'you'. But 'they' is also possible I agree with you.
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@lorentz Did you miss the bit about how they strongly advertise their pronouns?
Their profile pic at work — despite being required to use a photo of themselves — is a multicolor “Oh me oh my I’m not a girl nor a guy!” We had a repeated pronoun training session by HR when this person joined (plus several reminders over the following weeks) underscoring how different and special their preference is. They also don’t go by their name anywhere, but an acronym (which isn’t their initials) — kind of a tangent.
But yes, using “they” etc. is actually pretty natural as it’s a normal language construct in English. Though there are still cases where it sounds odd, and these always irk me.
Anyway, the point of the rant wasn’t the pronouns, but the steady “stream of consciousness” that the security bulletins and IT support bits are written in, and how difficult that is to read. -
I won't participate in this pronoun bullshit.
Power, is “power over human beings” , but “above all over the mind” The party controls external reality through the control of the mind, and it controls the mind, through the control of language.
Fucking thought police trying to destroy the language to gain power. I also refuse to participate in people playing pretend with their mental illnesses. The more they push, the more extreme my responses become.
This they/them shit sounds like biblical legion shit. -
@Demolishun this person has transcended pronouns to the point where they're no longer using them at all, and you're still whining. smh
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@spoiledgoods correct. I will continue to participate in my own mental illnesses. Your participation is not required.
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@lorentz other people may not default to neutral but think in male and female tho
i've always just thought of everything as amorphous entities and then put tags on them
but I think people view others with categories in mind like gender. while reflexively one may write in neutral sometimes in their head it's still gendered
it's kind of creepy and inappropriate to police the thoughts of others I think. like that's what all the pronouns nonsense is about. it's to violate the boundaries of your thoughts being inappropriate for others to determine. they want you to allow them access to your internal representations. no fucking thanks. not everybody internally represents information like everybody else and it shouldn't be the case that we all represent information the same way. diversity of thoughts have you heard of it motherfucker
anyway
wokism is creepy rapey shit and no thanks -
@Root this person is autistic and they don't realize they're being "enabled" by management so it's resulting in all this horrifying shit I think
well, that's my most positive and optimistic take on it
I get this sense that if they knew how cringe it all was they'd be horrifically embarrassed lol
autistic people can't tell social rules so just have to believe what others tell them. and then all this dumb political shit came into being which is telling them dumb shit people don't actually internally feel but externally prop up... so they're being told these are the social rules and so they follow them. to find out the social rules were fake and others actually don't "feel them internally" I think would be horrifying. honestly this political culture is just bullying autistic people and making a farce out of them. it's just there to cause strife. it preys on misunderstandings to make everybody hate each other. division and yada yada -
@jestdotty I hate the Canada is supporting this shit too. I think its called "compelled speech". Which is against freedom of speech. Practically every government is trying to quell the freedom of speech right now through multiple avenues.
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@jestdotty The purpose of a spoken pronoun is not to operate your own internal model though, it's a signal to a third party. By insisting on neutral pronouns they aren't telling you not to think of them as a girl, they're telling you not to tell others that they're a girl. I think spreading information about a person that is unverified and rejected by them is rude at best.
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@lorentz you've said so yourself that you translate between thoughts and speech
I do not translate between thoughts and speech. I just describe my thoughts with speech and it's an automatic and very taxing process, so I can't just be "dishonest" in the conversion
I use the speech I speak to help me make sense of my thoughts and organize them. so if I were to add a translation layer I would fuck up my whole psychology
I understand for you this is possible but it might not be possible for others who have different architectures. it might sound like a simple ask but... I mean it's fucking weird to ask. it's kind of not your territory and none of your business. it might be doable for some people but it's not doable for others. I hope that makes it make sense, in the sense that it's kind of not any different than asking an autistic person to do some kind of functionality for normies that then would fuck up their whole ecosystem. like that's fucked up to ask and frankly inappropriate. -
@Demolishun yeah Canada is into compelled speech
I actually haven't ran into anyone asking pronouns of me or anything of compelled speech but I do fear the day cuz I'd probably get in trouble
I'd just try to avoid the situation cuz I'd find it hard to lie. like I'd be disgusted with myself if Iied because I feared some kind of consequences. so it's just fundamentally incompatible with me. I'm not like trying to be rude and I don't hate or dislike people but I just can't bring myself to do that so 🤷, take it or leave it I guess. I mean I'm hoping I can still run into sane people in the future that get it. if that ceases to be the case or I get arrested (which isn't a joke, misgendering you get arrested for here, it's been put in the law) then well I guess I'm fucked. what can ya do 😩 -
@jestdotty I don't see how that changes anything though. The demands are still not placed against your thoughts but against your actions. Your actions are your own responsibility on the exact same principle that your thoughts are free.
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@lorentz While I agree that converging information about a person that they reject is rude, and you should strive to avoid doing such, this breaks down once people begin to use xir/xem, etc. where this conveys less useful information and is difficult to remember, and further: where you can get into trouble for not using their (and I use this phrase to the full extent of the meaning) personal pronouns. This effectively allows the individual in question to punish you, and in some cases quite severely, for forgetting or refusing.
It’s also a facet of forcing changes in the language, and therefore changes the thinking of those who use it. Doubleplusungood, comrade. -
@Tounai Agreed.
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@Root conveying*
Yuck @ 5 min edit window. -
@Root Your first paragraph is exactly why I don't like neopronouns, I completely agree.
I'm not convinced that changes to language are universally bad, because as you imply language affects the way its users think, and I don't think the existing and historical way of thinking is universally good. -
@lorentz Totally fair :)
But we just pick our future carefully, and this neopronoun one is not very promising! -
@Root By the way, one of the key lessons from 1984 is that thought policing is ultimately futile by and large. When Winston gets lost in the slums, it describes the poor engaging in all sorts of strictly forbidden pastimes. Evidently, while changes in language can be forced, the changes in thinking are only advised by the change of language.
The Hungarian language went though a lot of deliberate reform under socialist rule, but it also contains for example a feminine form of comrade as a hilarious, universal fuck you to the core tenets of socialism. -
@Demolishun what does the government have to do with any of this lol?
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@spoiledgoods in Canada it is a crime to misgender. The US governments is actively coercing social media sites to censor speech. In the UK you can be jailed for a meme. France just jailed the head of Telegram (not sure if still in jail). These are the ones I know about. I am sure there is more.
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Obligatory: if you actually went outside and interacted with people, you'd see that nobody actually gives a shit about any of this - at least not to the extreme extent that you do - and that the cultural shifts and "oppression" supposedly brought onto you by "the left" or "the elites" is actually just a big, dumb game of telephone you're playing that feeds you with bad information (your misinterpretation of that Canadian law is a great example. or should I say your handlers' misinterpretation lol) that shifts your worldview to the point where you're comparing reality to a dystopian sci-fi novel (written by a card-carrying socialist but idk if we're ready for that yet) where people aren't allowed to think and are quite literally scared of misgendering somebody that doesn't even exist
Like damn, you live like this? How can you live with that fear all the time? Don't you ever wonder why? -
@lorentz well if speaking is an action then I guess I'm gonna have to be mute
welcome to communism all over again -
@lorentz ah, you like that thought policing. that's the disconnect I guess
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@jestdotty I honestly can't imagine a system, legal or ethical, where speech isn't an action. Is wire fraud just legal then? Or on a more sensible basis, is slander completely normal? Are the organizers or inciters of a violent attack completely innocent as long as they didn't themselves get violent?
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@jestdotty In an technical sense, of course speech is an action, it affects other people by delivering information. It has an impact, and people relate in some way to that impact.
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@lorentz in the chemical / neuroscience and spiritual way speech is an action, your body doesn't distinguish
I hope you didn't intend your reply to be a gotcha cuz I'm gonna treat it as genuine now
intellectuals need speech. I cannot live without it. just because I say stuff doesn't mean I'll do them. but I need to say stuff to be able to explore stuff. it's obviously better to say things than do things if they are bad things or sus things, also. these are called "thought experiments" and that's how philosophy has been done for thousands of years and basically vast majority of human progress. you can't know what things are unless you go there, and not being able to explore evil would be the dumbest thing imaginable because it would open you up to be a lamb for the slaughter if you can't itemize the tactics and strategies or understand things enough to articulate the issues. inb4 noticing a crime is the thought crime itself -
@lorentz wire fraud isn't words and doesn't make sense to mention
slander is actually completely normal. people do it all the time. like Sid calling me racist everywhere he goes, or the stuff they do to trump, Russia, your favourite misunderstood thing here. slander is an extremely common human past time, every self serving confirmation bias excuse or narrative, and every ad hominem is slander. you can't escape it. humans are folly, they're not god and they will never have the objective true opinion to describe something. we are all perpetually in error. there is no escape. you just have your opinion of what something is, and if you veer off from objective in any way there will be consequences and damages, whether intended or not. you can't have this as a principle because everybody would fail it, or delude themselves into something very very bad -
@lorentz organizers and inciters of violence do remain free from criminal prosecution, or have historically. a very famous one is Charles Manson. hey didn't they say trump incited violence on January 6th by telling his protesters to be peaceful? honestly this enters insane territory
FBI incites violence all the time, they're known for it. the meme a cop can't tell a lie. there's whole documentaries of the FBI talking dumb people into accepting weapons from them and then arresting them and positioning them as some sort of criminal masterminds. this still happens to this day. nobody cares and you're on your own. you aren't any more holy and don't deserve the right to police others any more than they do though. if the devil talks you into doing harm, that's called going to hell -
@jestdotty
1. A thought experiment is clearly marked as such. A statement about a real person is not a thought experiment. I also completely disagree that everything has to be said. Communication is a need, the topic is a choice.
2. I'm not policing anyone, but I get to observe your communication, anticipate future actions (like communication) and their effect on me and people and communities I care about, and act accordingly. I still don't get why this is a hard concept. Everything that has consequences, including communication, has an associated responsibility. Whether you're responsible because it's your views or because it's your choice to communicate them doesn't have the slightest significance. -
@jestdotty I don't get your argument about the misdeeds I mentioned. You agree that they're bad, or am I misunderstanding something? Is the basis that people get away with them at large scale? How does that affect anything?
Wire fraud needed to be defined in a new law when the telephone was invented precisely because initially it was argued that perpetrators did nothing illegal, just talked to a person who cooperated on their own free will. -
@lorentz do you know what separates humans from animals
it's something they term consciousness
the humans are very odd because we have so much of it. it allows us to have culture, deep empathy. it is what powers communication to the degree it is at
Humana are massively adaptable compared to other species on earth. massively successful. yet physically the only thing we're good at is long distance running -- we can't climb like monkeys, we're too weak compared to any other animal, we don't really have any special abilities, like regrowing teeth, regrowing tails, being able to hibernate, shed skin, reverse age, use deadly chemicals, etc. our only special ability is to sweat off heat which is what allows us to hunt via endurance -
@lorentz the reason why the human race is so successful is because we can let our thoughts die instead of ourselves. we can simulate reality in our thoughts, see the consequences, and then learn, like running a simulator, like testing yourself in a video game before you have to do the real thing with real consequences
if you prevent speech you'd lose all that. real people will die instead, again -
@lorentz you're policing that people should use pronouns even though that may not be how they think of the person in their head. so either they must edit their brain to speech translator to say untruths or they must change their thoughts to think of people according to the pronouns they want to be called (which is creepier)
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@lorentz are they bad? I don't know they're just things. I know people don't want them to happen to them
I mean wire fraud, people probably would like it to happen to them because they'd benefit, but being caught doing wire fraud probably not, and knowing someone else did wire fraud and you didn't get the benefits of wire fraud would be jealousy or "how dare you not follow rules!". I don't think people really think of wire fraud in the metaphysical way I'd interpret it, which is gonna be sort of disassociated because I'm just viewing the whole thing as a system
talked to a person who cooperated on their free will? I mean the person signed a contract to be a vendor that services calls. they're not complicit in the crime (is it obvious it was a crime?), they're just upholding their promise to their employer (banality of evil maybe? idk). I don't know the wire fraud you're on about though, and if you're being emotional you'll probably just misinterpret things to lead me somewhere -
@Demolishun is it really a crime in Canada to misgender though?
Hate speech, as far as I know, is, but it's difficult to prosecute because of how arbitrary it is and how inefficient the legal system is. Hell, the federal government cannot even properly prosecute criminals and terrorists which are no-way in a legal grey zone. -
@PepeTheFrog from what I can tell if you are a big enough dick it could elevate to hate speech. So there is a path to legal consequences. I looked at how canada handles hate speech. It is weird. They do not legally define what "hate" means. So there are legal consequences to hate speech, but the judges get to decide if what you said is hate speech. Which seems kind of bass ackwards. It seems like you could get arrested or made to come to court of "hate speech" and you get the wrong judge you could get consequences. But right now it seems like you would have to be a really big douche an defy court orders to get jail time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The reason pronouns could be an issue is because of C-16:
https://cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/...
Then there is this:
https://them.us/story/...
So it is not cut a dry either way.
!dev
There’s this person at $work who never uses punctuation of any kind. She has mental issues and insists on neutral pronouns (and strongly advertises these) so I’ll use the indefinite to pretend to be respectful. It has multiple thoughts while typing a message and just keeps typing through all of them without stopping. It pauses not to collect its thoughts, to edit for clarity or to fix mistakes, to separate anything (including disjoint topics), to summarize, etc. (Though calling these “thoughts” is a huge stretch, given its lack of propensity for that particular subject.) It’s as if it has zero distinction between writing and speaking, and simply lets the mental diarrhea flow while their fingers do their best to keep pace. Reading these trainwrecks of thought — and gleaning any useful information from them — is always difficult and a little bit painful.
It is also in charge of IT security, which is more than a bit worrying. (But I hate the company with a passion, so it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it otherwise would.)
rant
root reads a security bulletin